Re: homogenous user base and MAGA trumpets... in 1998 or so, when I did an informal analysis of USENET centralized moderation vs Slashdot distributed moderation and number-of-posts/day counts across both platforms, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh was one of the highest trafficked USENET groups. The proto-MAGA crowd was there.
USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
> USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
My Usenet was fairly homogenous, because I only subscribed to a handful of groups. You simply couldn't read the traffic on 100,000 groups! But the full list of groups was extremely diverse.
The list of groups also depended on which server you were using as your feed. Many servers carried groups dealing with some product the operator sold; those groups weren't always relayed by other servers. In fact I guess that's still the case.
USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?